Permissions
CakePHP uses the app/tmp directory for a number of different operations. Model descriptions, cached
views, and session information are just a few examples.
As such, make sure the directory app/tmp and all its subdirectories in your cake installation are writable
by the web server user.
Setup
Setting up CakePHP can be as simple as slapping it in your web server’s document root, or as complex and
flexible as you wish. This section will cover the three main installation types for CakePHP: development,
production, and advanced.
• Development: easy to get going, URLs for the application include the CakePHP installation directory
name, and less secure.
• Production: Requires the ability to configure the web server’s document root, clean URLs, very secure.
• Advanced: With some configuration, allows you to place key CakePHP directories in different parts
of the filesystem, possibly sharing a single CakePHP core library folder amongst many CakePHP
applications.
Development
A development installation is the fastest method to setup Cake. This example will help you install a
CakePHP application and make it available at http://www.example.com/cake_2_0/. We assume for the purposes
of this example that your document root is set to /var/www/html.

Unpack the contents of the Cake archive into /var/www/html. You now have a folder in your document
root named after the release you’ve downloaded (e.g. cake_2.0.0). Rename this folder to cake_2_0. Your
development setup will look like this on the file system:
/var/www/html/
cake_2_0/
app/
lib/
plugins/
vendors/
.htaccess
index.php
README
If your web server is configured correctly, you should now find your Cake application accessible at
http://www.example.com/cake_2_0/.
Using one CakePHP checkout for multiple applications
If you are developing a number of applications, it often makes sense to have them share the same CakePHP
core checkout. There are a few ways in which you can accomplish this. Often the easiest is to use PHP’s
include_path. To start off, clone CakePHP into a directory. For this example, we’ll use ~/projects:
git clone git://github.com/cakephp/cakephp.git ~/projects/cakephp
This will clone CakePHP into your ~/projects directory. If you don’t want to use git, you can download
a zipball and the remaining steps will be the same. Next you’ll have to locate and modify your php.ini.
On *nix systems this is often in /etc/php.ini, but using php -i and looking for ‘Loaded Configuration
File’. Once you’ve found the correct ini file, modify the include_path configuration to include
~/projects/cakephp/lib. An example would look like:
include_path = .:/home/mark/projects/cakephp/lib:/usr/local/php/lib/php
After restarting your webserver, you should see the changes reflected in phpinfo().
Note: If you are on windows, separate include paths with ; instead of :
Having finished setting up your include_path your applications should be able to find CakePHP automatically.